Denise Bates is a writer on social history whose latest book, Historical Research using British Newspapers, is a guide to using newspaper archives in research, particularly the British Newspaper Archive. In this guest blog post, she describes what led her to write about using digitised newspapers. 

The inspiration for Historical Research Using British Newspapers was a very modern concept; the blog. I used old newspapers extensively whilst researching my first two books, Pit Lasses and Breach of Promise to Marry. The positive reaction to my blog for the British Newspaper Archive about the differences between national and local newspapers surprised me as I had not expected this to be new learning. After more investigation I realised that twenty-first century historians have an exciting new resource, digitised, on-line newspapers, but little information about using them effectively. The seeds of my next project were planted.

When I first started using old newspapers, like many researchers I was learning on the job and made mistakes along the way. These included not knowing which titles were the best ones to consult first and thus wasting time trying to understand a topic that was well-covered in a different publication. I also made unrealistic assumptions about how much time was needed to locate and study reports. I decided on a book which brought together the many issues that are relevant to users of old newspapers, including the history of the press, how to find good quality information, how to use it productively and the pitfalls to avoid.

Digitised newspapers have a growing fan-base. Their preserved pages contain a rich vein of forgotten material, allowing researchers to broaden their enquiries from the standard sources on many topics and to cite new examples, rather than recycling the same few. Newspapers sometimes offer an unorthodox view of the past, with content which challenges the version that has been handed down in exam syllabuses and popular histories alike. For topics that have not been studied or written about, newspapers are an accessible way of rediscovering aspects of the past that have been forgotten.

Illustrated Police News 29 July 1882. An artist's impression of a breach of promise case and a case of child cruelty.

Unanticipated discoveries have changed my understanding of the nineteenth century. When I used court reports to delve into the archaic world of the jilted women and men who sued a former fiancé for compensation, I found that no-win-no fee lawyers, who I had previously believed to be a product of the late twentieth century, ran flourishing practices as early as the 1820s. When I looked at several cases involving child cruelty or neglect in the 1890s, I entered a world of high-minded social workers who could not comprehend how the people they were trying to help had to live. Amongst some very serious and indisputable instances of ill-treatment, were several shocking but unwarranted accusations of laziness, selfishness and drunkenness made against caring parents whose wages were too low to feed and clothe their children properly, even though they had been instructed about cleanliness and nutrition. Suddenly I knew the roots of the fear that haunted working-class families as I grew up in the 1960s, that if you didn't do as 'they' said, 'they' might take your children away.

'Eruption of Mount Vesuvius', Penny Illustrated Paper, 17 October 1863. This scene would have been a revelation to most readers of the time.

Every type of material has its drawbacks and old newspapers are far from being the perfect resource. The number of pages that are already on-line can make them unwieldy to handle if a query produces a large number of matches. It is possible to become overwhelmed by detail and miss important information or insight. There are plenty of places in the news chain where error can creep into a report and sometimes they cover a topic in a very superficial way. Occasionally a researcher may strike lucky and quickly locate an editorial or journalist's investigation that provides a complete answer. More usually it will be necessary to find, collate and analyse a number of individual reports in order to uncover the full story or unlock relevant learning.

Almost all sources are affected by bias and newspapers are no exception. They have been subjected to censorship, may have printed propaganda or portrayed opinion as fact. These problems are not insurmountable, but users need to know how to recognise and manage them in order to avoid jumping to false conclusions.  

When newspapers were first published, they opened up a wider world to the literate people of the day. Reproduced digitally, they are now allowing twenty-first century researchers to immerse themselves in the past in a way that no other resource can and make new discoveries.

Denise Bates (www.denisebates.co.uk)

It has been a while since we produced an edition of the St Pancras Intelligencer, our round-up of news about news. Producing a regular series proved to be rather too much of a challenge, but not wanting to see a good title go down, we are recasting the Intelligencer as an occasional series. Much like the first newspapers in the 17th century, we will publish a new edition when we have gathered enough stories to fill the space available. So here is some of what has been happening recently in the world of news about news.

http://panamapapers.sueddeutsche.de

The Panama Papers. The leak of millions of papers from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca has sent shockwaves across the world. The story behind the leak is as fascinating as the outcome. Wired gives the background story. The now famous International Consortium of Investigative Journalists collates the information on a smartly designed special website. And the newspaper that first received the documents, Süddeutsche Zeitung, has its own stylish website dedicated to the story, in German and English, which dramatises the material with fine use of illustrations and charts.

The art of being in the wrong place at the right time: behind the scenes of social media newsgathering. A powerful piece by David Crunelle, eyewitness to the Brussels airport bombings who was then bombarded with requests from the news media.

Editor hits out at "supine journalism" in regional press. Mike Gibson, editor of the Brighton Argus, criticises the "poor state" of much of the English regional press, as reported by Hold the Front Page.

Can newspapers do anything to stop the advertising exodus? Roy Greenslade worries about the future viability of newspapers, assailed by falling advertising revenues on one hand and the use of ad-blocking software on the other.

The life and times of a newspaper baron. Interesting piece by Peter Day on BBC News on Lord Thomson of Fleet, owner of The Times before Rupert Murdoch.

Action Research in Audience Analytics. A report from Nesta on how hyperlocals can learn from their audiences to build up their audiences.

Do newspaper archives need a “dead man’s switch”? Thought-provoking piece from Tara Calishain at ResearchBuzz on the perils of disappearing digital newspaper archives.

http://www.thecinetourist.net/news.html

The Cine-Tourist is a film history site with a psychogeographical bent, managed by Roland-François Lack of University College London. His speciality is gathering thematic screengrabs from historic films, and he has produced a terrific gallery of scenes from films in which real and imaginary newspapers appear. See which films you recognise.

Investigative brand journalism. Nieman Lab looks at the Guardian's true crime reporting series, How to Solve a Murder, with its sponsorship from Amazon.

Newspapers gobble each other up to survive digital apocalypse. Great title for a Bloomberg piece on American newspaper business strategies.

"The lowest, most filthy, most unhealthy and most wicked locality". Journalist-turned-historian Dean Kirby (guest writing for the Newsroom blog) looks at the worst parts of 19th century Manchester and what newspaper archives reveal about them.

Independent launches paid-for digital edition. As we said goodbye to the print editions of The Independent and the Independent on Sunday, a new paid-for digital daily edition appeared, looking much like the print version (doubtless to reassure traditional subscribers). On the same subject, the Indy gave us a gallery of the best of its front covers (note how raggedy the pre-digital-era copies now look), and wrote boldly about the opportunities offered by new technologies. At Medital, Torin Douglas looked back to 1986 and the founding of the The Independent. And at this blog, we attended a debate on print newspapers post-Independent and what the digital future might be, and concluded that nobody knows anything.

El Pais, Spain's best-selling newspaper may end print edition. If you thought The Independent going digital only was big news, consider that Spain's leading newspaper may go the same way.

Scale of Hearst plot to discredit Orson Welles and Citizen Kane revealed. Dalya Alberge at The Guardian on a new book by Harlan Lebo that shows how hard William Randolph Hearst tried to attack Citizen Kane, the greatest of all newspaper movies.

The New Day is selling just 40,000 copies a day but Trinity Mirror stands by its launch despite the slow start. And finally, we have a new national newspaper in The New Day (boldly refusing to have a website), but as The Drum reports, the take-up figures aren't encouraging so far for a newspaper aimed at those who don't read newspapers.

The screenwriter William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men, The Princess Bride) wrote one of the essential books on Hollywood, Adventures in the Screen Trade. Among its many words of wisdom about how movies actually work, the most celebrated are those that express what he calls "the single most important fact, perhaps, of the entire movie industry" -

NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING

Attending a debate on the future of newspapers at City University yesterday, Goldman's words came to me. In the world of digital news that now faces us, nobody knows anything.

Independent Digital front pages, from http://edition.independent.co.uk

Now this isn't necessarily a bad thing. Hollywood may lurch from triumph to disaster to further disaster with little idea of what is going to succeed, yet it continues to produce the occasional great or commercially successful film, and it has not collapsed as a business. But it lives in a constant state of anxiety, because its hopes are all based around the whims of a mercurial audience. After centuries of producing news in a form that people would regularly buy into, the news industry is now facing a world in which it cannot say from one year to the next what model is going to work, or whether there ever will be the same stability on which the newspaper business subsisted for so long.

The debate was entitled "Newsprint - it ain't over yet!" (originally it was billed as the less confident "Is print dead?")  and was organised by City University and the Media Society. Chaired by Professor Roy Greenslade of City University and Guardian Media, the guest speakers were Sarah Baxter, Deputy Editor of the Sunday Times, Christian Broughton, Editor of the Independent Digital and Jane Singer, Professor of Journalism Innovation at City University. Sadly, Alison Phillips, editor of the UK's latest national newspaper, The New Day, was advertised but not available on the day.

It was an interesting debate, if somewhat skewed towards the view of journalists rather than readers, inevitably given the speakers and the audience of journalism students and media professionals. The current crises were all addressed - the challenges of making digital pay, the supposed threat of the BBC towards regional newspapers, the challenge of ad-blocking software to business models, what jobs are there for today's journalism students? - and the generally expressed fears of who will hold governments to account in a world without newspapers and traditional investigative journalism.

The two speakers from news organisations spoke confidently about their latest business models. The Independent closed its print edition on 26 March, but has strongly asserted the power of its digital, with a website that is profitable, and the newly-launched daily digital edition with front-page layout looking for all the world like the print edition still existed (no doubt to comfort former subscribers to the print version who they hope will move over to the digital). The Times and Sunday Times have announced that they are moving away from a rolling digital news model (the "flim-flam of passing news" in Baxter's words) to offer a joint digital news package in timed editions (9am, midday and 5pm), just like a print newspaper.

The debate at City University, with (L-R) Christian Broughton, Jane Singer, Roy Greenslade and Sarah Baxter

So the latest digital news models are looking towards mimicking the solidity of print. This may comfort the traditionalist buyers, and is an acknowledgment of the power of brand and the strength of print in making a news story part of the public agenda. But that's just today's strategy. Who can say if they will still be operational five years from now, or even a year from now? Other great ideas for ensuring long-term stability will follow soon enough, while others will pursue their own plans. Perhaps the Blendle model of pay-per-article, as developed in the Netherlands, will prove successful. Perhaps philanthropic funding models that work in the USA can be transported here. Perhaps the paid-for model adopted by The Times offers the only security. Perhaps going free but reaching out to as many millions as possible is what will work. Perhaps print will endure far longer than we expect, valued by an 'elite' audience if not the majority.

The truth is, nobody knows. This is a huge challenge for the British Library, which has a mission to preserve the UK's news. Such archiving thrives on consistency of output, something which print newspapers have long provided, with their uniformity of format and regularity of publication. The days of certainty are over for news archiving as they are for news publication. We will have to keep reinventing policies and procedures, just to keep up. It certainly seems unlikely that we will ever return to the reliability of the past. Sarah Baxter said that we are in a transitional phase of news production, but perhaps it is always going to be a transitional phase.

News publication in the future looks to be condemned to uncertainty, flitting from one platform to another, from one business model to the next - because that is how the digital world works, with its continual need to keep re-inventing itself. News publication will nevertheless thrive, however, in one form or another, because we will always thirst for news. It will continue to hit the occasional heights, keeping us informed and creating essential talking points. But, like the movies, it is doomed to a constant state of anxiety, for as long into the future as anyone can see.

 

 

Dean Kirby is a journalist who has been covering the news in and around Manchester, his home city, for nearly 20 years. His debut book, Angel Meadow: Victorian Britain's Most Savage Slum, published by Pen & Sword, is the first history of Angel Meadow, the 19th century Manchester slum so vile and dangerous that it was described by Friedrich Engels as "hell upon earth". To find out more about the book, visit www.angelmeadowbook.com. Here, Dean tells how he used British Library newspapers at the British Newspaper Archive to uncover the horrors of Angel Meadow.

When Manchester was the powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution, Angel Meadow was the city’s vilest and most dangerous slum.

A wild and brutal borderland at the northern edge of Cottonopolis, it was home to 30,000 workers who struggled for survival in conditions so appalling that it was described by Friedrich Engels as “hell upon earth” in 1845.

I became fascinated by the story of Angel Meadow when I discovered that my Victorian forefather, an Irish immigrant named William Kirby, had washed up there after surviving the potato famine.

In 2012, archaeologists investigating Victorian Manchester’s horrors made a startling discovery while digging up a car park in Angel Meadow – my  ancestor’s home.

They gave me permission to clamber down a shaky ladder to touch the still-sooty bricks of William’s fireplace and the paper-thin walls that separated his 10ft-square, one-up-one-down from the house next door.

As I searched for clues about my ancestor’s life in Manchester’s archives and began formulating the idea of writing a book, I started to drift off to the slum in my imagination.

I descended into damp cellars, stumbled through backyard pigsties and came face-to-face with scarred and tattooed street fighters or “scuttlers” in the slum’s smoke-filled beer houses.

I crept into dingy lodging houses where new arrivals were forced to sleep naked with strangers because it was the only way to keep their clothes free from lice.

The more I read, the most astonished I became by my ancestor’s survival in this hellish place – leading to my own existence more than a century later in the city that his blood sweat and tears had helped to create.

Morning Chronicle, 12 November 1849

My journey of discovery was led by an army of Victorian journalists who walked those streets for real, and whose words have survived among the millions of pages in the British Newspaper Archive.

They included men such as the Fleet Street journalist Angus Bethune Reach, who told readers of the Morning Chronicle in 1849 of his descent into one of Angel Meadow’s many inhabited cellars, where he found an old man asleep in a shallow cave no bigger than a coffin scooped out of the wall.

“The lowest, most filthy, most unhealthy and most wicked locality in Manchester is called, singularly enough, Angel Meadow,” he wrote. “It is full of cellars and inhabited by prostitutes, their bullies, thieves, cadgers, vagrants, tramps and, in the very worst sties of filth and darkness, by those unhappy wretches, the low Irish.”

Another journalist from the Manchester Evening News, my former newspaper, found himself on the run from the police in 1874 after entering a beerhouse disguised as a rogue with a criminal named Mack acting as his guide.

The terrified reporter fled into a lodging house operated by a notorious thief-trainer named Cabbage Ann and found her superintending a wake for an eminent pick-pocket or “gun”.

“The place looked squalid and miserable,” the journalist later wrote, “and the people in it were of poor, miserable appearance, as if they found it hard to live at all.”

Searching the newspaper archive like an investigator hunting for further clues, I slowly managed to piece together the real identity of Cabbage Ann, and other slum dwellers with exotic names such as Jemmy the Crawler, the Badger and Long Dick.

Beautifully-written nineteenth century court reports allowed me to follow every twist and turn of their lengthy criminal careers, while useful snippets such as weather forecasts helped me to say whether it was raining in Manchester when they committed their crimes.

Henry Burgess, from Staffordshire Record Office

I also used census documents and prison archives held by findmypast.co.uk to create pen pictures of the most notorious criminals – right down to their eye colour and tattoos.

One man in particular jumped out from the pages. He was called Henry Burgess (Harry to his relatives) and he was a scuttler who, at just 5ft-tall and with steel-coloured eyes, was the most feared man in Angel Meadow.

Burgess, a neighbour of my ancestor William Kirby, had more than 40 convictions to his name including shop-breaking, rioting and assaults on police. No-one was safe including his partner, Mary Ellen Burns, who lost an eye when he attacked her with an iron poker.

Thanks to the stories in the archive, I eventually managed to track down a prison mugshot of Burgess in which he stares with cold, hard eyes and shaven head towards the camera. 

Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 9 May 1893

In all of the hundreds of pages of newsprint that I read during my research, one story involving Burgess perfectly symbolised the horrors of Angel Meadow.

On Saturday, May 6, 1893, as Britain was sweltering under a drought, Burgess got into a row with a rival named Thomas Matthews in the streets of the slum.

He took a paraffin lantern from his sister’s parlour, marched down the street and, planting his feet on the cobbles, threw it at Matthews and turned him into a human fireball.

Matthews, a father to a young daughter, died from horrific burns at Manchester Royal Infirmary in the early hours after giving a statement to the police identifying Burgess as his killer.

Matthews' final words were immortalised in black newspaper ink in one of the many columns, just a few inches long, that had been carefully preserved in the British Newspaper Archive.

I was perhaps the first person to read those words, spoken by Matthews with badly burned lips and tongue, in more than 120 years.

“I am very ill,” he said, “and I believe I am going to die.”

 

Dean Kirby

The news that The Independent and The Independent on Sunday are to close down, and the spin-off newspaper i to be sold off to Johnston Press, has led to much discussion about the future of newspapers. Is the decision to cease print and develop the independent.co.uk website a sign of the death of print newspapers? Was The Independent squeezed out of the market and hence a failure, or is the shift to web-only a timely strategic move, supported by growing use of what is apparently a profitable website, which other newspapers will inevitably follow in turn? Can a newspaper brand survive when it no longer has a newspaper?

The Independent in print, via Independent.co.uk

Here at the British Library we have seen many newspapers come and go. We take in 1,400 newspaper publications of one sort or another every week, but we have some 35,000 newspaper titles listed on our catalogue. A lot of newspapers have ceased publication over the past 400 years, and The Independent is merely the latest. But the gradual transference of a news industry from print to digital has major implications for what we collect in this area, and how. It is something that we are studying closely.

At present we acquire newspapers in print form. We would like to acquire more newspapers digitally, and newspapers today are produced in digital form (PDF usually) from which the print copy is then generated. But these digital copies are not published as such, consequently they do not qualify as 'publications' and cannot be collected under Legal Deposit. Of course some newspapers are available in digital facsimile form on their websites, which we could collect via our web archiving operation, but the PDFs that are available are of lower image quality (less suitable for preservation), and there is a shrinking number of these, as newspapers turn instead to aggregation services such as PageSuite to deliver their digital copies for them.

So why not just archive the websites? They have the same content as the newspapers, don't they? Well, no they don't. We recently  conducted a study in regional newspapers and their web equivalents, to see how similar content was between the two forms. We found that the typical UK regional newspaper, in any one week, had roughly 40% of stories unique to print, 15% unique to online, and 45% that the forms shared (we looked only at news editorial, not advertising, arts coverage or sport). Some newspapers are closer to their web equivalents than others, but in general the two forms are not the same, and are diverging all the more.

Title	Print issue date	No. of news stories	% unique to print	% unique to online	%  shared by both
Edgware & Mill Hill Press	30/7/2015	30	46	26	26
Hertfordshire Mercury	13/8/2015	90	49	34	16
Herts Advertiser	23/7/2015	72	30	33	36
Luton News + Herald & Post	12/8/2015	42	55	0	43
Medway Messenger	3/8/2015	75	73	13	13
Redditch & Alcester Standard	21/8/2015	51	19	13	66
Watford Observer	7/8/2015	65	4	3	92
The Wharf	20/8/2015	31	32	3	64

 Analysis of stories published by selected UK regional weekly newspapers

Nevertheless, we are archiving the websites. Since 2013, when non-print Legal Deposit legislation was introduced, enabling the British Library and the other Legal Deposit libraries in the UK and Ireland to start archiving the UK Web, we have been gathering in UK news sites. And whereas we archive most UK sites once a year, for news sites we are archiving them on an either daily or weekly basis. It's not just newspaper sites, however - we are capturing web-only news sites, community journalism sites (hyperlocals), news broadcasters' sites, news parody sites and more. We have 1,800 on our list so far, and we are still adding titles. It's not easy to keep track of all of the UK news sites, because there is no definitive list. The numbers keep shifting. Publications such as Benn's Media Directory keep a track of registered news publications on an annual basis, and the handy Local Web List database tries to identify all of the self-produced community journalism sites out there, but, frankly, trying to keep the Web in bibliographic order is like herding ants.

All newspapers and other serial publications in the UK are assigned a unique identifier, the ISSN (similar to the ISBN for books). The ISSN underpins the collecting of newspapers under Legal Deposit in this country, not least because it is key to issuing barcodes. So it is that we manage to keep track with nearly every UK newspaper as it is published.

The problem is that websites don't need barcodes. There is no operational ID system for pinpointing a news site, beyond knowing the URL, and that doesn't help when it comes to keeping track of all different variants, spin-offs (blogs, microsites etc) and other changes that a news site and its digital family may go through. And how do you define what a news website is in any case, if you start to include blogs, hyperlocals, forums and so on? 

Then there is the problem of referring to 'news websites', as though capturing these through archiving would be the answer. Newspapers were once the sole form in which printed journalism appeared. Today, newspapers have become apps. News is produced by publishers across diverse platforms which draw their material from content management systems. A newspaper is one such output; a website another; a mobile application another. To build the news archive of the future, we might need to think less of capturing print or digital publications, and more about preserving the engines that have generated them (and the digital content fed into such engines). Then we could generate how the news looked to anyone at a particular place and point in time, according to the applications and devices that would have been available to them.

From print to digital, via Guardian

And that highlights another problem for the future archiving of news. A newspaper is predicated on the understanding that all who purchase it will share in the same news. They might have differing opinions about that news, yet they still share in it.

But news is not like that anymore. News is tailored to the individual, who has increasing editorial control over what news matters to them, as our news content strategy notes. Twitter feeds, Facebook news aggregation, multiple TV news channels, all put the selection of news in the hands of the consumer (even if the algorithms of Facebook and Google do much of that tailoring for us). No one sees the same news any more. This is why the archiving of Twitter is such a conundrum. There is no one Twitter out there - everyone's experience of it is different. How are we to recreate such an experience, to make our future news archives valid?

Theorising over the nature of news is all very interesting, but we have to make practical decisions to ensure that we archive newspapers, their digital derivatives and competitors in a multimedia news market, as thoroughly and efficiently as we can. We continue to take in most UK newspapers in print, and we are close to doing the same with news websites. We archive TV and radio news, albeit selectively. It would help a lot if we knew if and when newspapers are to disappear, but no one does.

Or maybe one person does. Speaking to the Leveson enquiry on 25 April 2012, Rupert Murdoch gave his thoughts on the future of print newspapers.

Every newspaper has had a very good run ... It's coming to an end as a result of these disruptive technologies ... I think we will have both [internet and print news] for quite a while, certainly ten years, some people say five. I'd be more inclined to say 20, but 20 means very small circulations.

And that could be it. Newspapers will last a generation. It may not be an even decline, because what applies to the nationals is not necessarily the same as the regionals. The UK's national newspapers, of which there are around 30, attract a particular kind of advertiser and have the potential to reach out internationally (which is what The Independent's owners are pinning their hopes upon). For regional newspapers, of which there are around 100 dailies and 1,200 weeklies, there seems to be a different model operating, one where local advertising combined with consumer loyalty may keep some titles in print for a good while yet, even as the same titles increase their digital foothold (the recent ranking of UK media publications for 2015 by SimilarWeb shows regional publisher like Kentonline, Birmingham Mail and Liverpool Echo among those titles with the highest percentage of mobile traffic share).

The UK's top 10 publications ranked on mobile traffic share, via SimilarWeb

However long it takes, time is running out for print newspapers. It will be our job to ensure that we continue to serve the needs of UK research by increasingly gathering news in its digital forms. We need a smooth transition, with consistency of representation. The challenge is that the mechanisms to do so are not fully in place as yet. The technologies are; the means to ensure capture, identification and continuity are not. But we're working on it. 

Dennis Griffiths, journalist and newspaper historian, died on 24 December 2015, aged 82. He worked for over forty years in the regional and national UK press, serving as production director at the London Evening Standard, and research and development director with Express newspapers. However, he is best known for the histories of British newspapers that he produced upon his retirement, and for his dedicated efforts towards promoting appreciation of newspaper history, which included working closely on several occasions with the British Library.

Dennis Griffiths (the facsimile colour picture of the Moon landing was a famous coup by which he enabled the Evening Standard to scoop the rest of Fleet Street)

If you go behind the scenes at the British Library and see the desks of the Newsroom reference staff, you will see that each one features a copy of Dennis Griffiths' The Encyclopedia of the British Press 1422-1992 (1992). This essential reference guide is used constantly by archivists, librarians and academics, with its wide-ranging biographies of journalists, editors and owners, its authoritative entries on individual newspapers, and its essays on aspects of newspaper history and the work of newspaper-related organisations.

His best-known work, however, is Plant Here the Standard (1996), a definitive and much-praised history of the Evening Standard. His other works included Fleet Street: Five Hundred Years of the Press (2006), an exhaustive history of the newspaper press in London, published by the British Library, and most recently Blum & Taff: A Tale of Two Editors (2013), his story of the newspaper editors R.D. Blumenfeld and H.A. Gwynne, produced by his own Coranto Press.

His Fleet Street book was produced to accompany the British Library's 2006 exhibition on newspaper history, The Front Page, marking the centenary of the Newspaper Publishers Association. He served as a lead curator for the exhibition and made use our offices at the former British Library Newspapers building in Colindale. He was a member of the Library's Consultative Group on Newspapers in the 1990s, and made a generous donation of several items from his private reference collection of works on the history of journalism and the press for the then Newspaper Library Reading Room reference collection, a number of which remain on open access in the Newsroom at the British Library's St Pancras building. He also carried out a feasibility study into the Heritage Lottery Fund  bid for what would become the Newsplan 2000 project to microfilm endangered newspapers in libraries across the UK.

The newspaper-style background guide to the British Library's 2006 exhibition The Front Page

Between 1999 to 2002 Griffiths served as Chairman of the London Press Club, which operates as a society for journalists and through which he did much to promote newspaper history, including helping to organise the unveiling by the Prince of Wales of a plaque to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the first British regular daily newspaper (The Daily Courant). 

Newspapers history has been served greatly by Dennis Griffiths' dedicated and scrupulous research and commitment to public understanding. We here in the British Library's news collection lament his passing and are grateful for all the help that he provided for so many years.

Tributes have been paid to Dennis Griffiths by the Evening Standard, Roy Greenslade at The Guardian, The Independent, the Telegraph, the Society of Editors, and the London Press Club. The greatest tribute will come from students for many years hence who will be able to rely on his research and his reference works.

We're pleased to announce a partnership with the Financial Times to open up its archives to new kinds of research. The business news daily newspaper has been running since 1888, and has a wealth of information on national and international economic news, and in recent years reporting on general news, the arts and society. Its digital archive is available in the standard search-and-browse manner to institutional subscribers via Cengage Gale, but the newspaper is interested to explore different ways to makes its archives available, with an emphasis on what can be done with its data.

The full digital archive runs 1888-2010 and comprises 903,029 pages from 37,464 print editions. However, the collaboration is starting off with a relatively small amount of content, which may expand later. The FT has agreed a licence which permits use of the data for academic research purposes, either onsite at the British Library or via controlled remote access. 

Four complete sample years of FT pages images (as JPEGs) and data (XML) are being made available to research teams: 1888, 1939, 1966 and 1991. The licence runs to the end of 2015, when we will review what has been learned and will see how access and use may be extended thereafter. So the sample years would be ideal for researchers developing data-driven projects who need some test content to scope future plans, or to test tools or applications that they may be developing.

Anyone who is interested should get in touch with Luke McKernan, Lead Curator News & Moving Image at the British Library, who can provide further details. Research teams may also be interested be to take part in the Library's first news hackathon, scheduled for November 16th, which will include FT data alongside data derived from the Library's own news collection. More news on this will be published soon.

The collaboration with the Financial Times is one part of emerging plans for British Library news data. The structure of news content offers numerous opportunities for analysing, interrogating, visualising and rethinking what news archives today, as well as creating new kinds of newspaper and and other news media history. We held a news data workshop on September 7th, where we brought together researchers, developers and content owners to look at ways we might develop plans for news data that would best benefit researchers. There's a report on the workshop on our Digital Scholarship blog.

We will hope to be issuing news on further news archive datasets that we can make available for research in the near future.

 

Since April 2013 the British Library has been archiving millions of UK websites for the Legal Deposit UK Web Archive. Most of these sites are archived on an annual basis, but around 1,000 news-based websites are being archived on a weekly or monthly basis. These include newspaper title websites, news broadcaster sites, web-only news sites, and ‘hyperlocal’ community journalism sites.

We continue to add more news sites to the archive, and to review the frequency with which they are archived. All of the archives are made available in our Reading Rooms in London (St Pancras) and Yorkshire (Boston Spa), as well as the other Legal Deposit libraries in the UK and Ireland.

We are undertaking a review of our digital news intake, and we would like to take in the views of researchers. The aim of this workshop is to introduce the Web news collection, to ask the participants to test out some of the archived news sites, and to discuss how best Web news sites can be used for research. We will be looking at the archived sites versus their live Web equivalents, and comparing Web news with newspapers.

The workshop will take place 2 September 2015, 15:00-16:00, at the Business & IP Centre, Floor 1, British Library (St Pancras). The workshop is free, but spaces are limited. If you are interested in taking part, please contact us at [email protected] to book a place.

 To find out more about our Web news collections, visit http://www.bl.uk/collection-guides/web-news.

The bicentenary of the battle of Waterloo is upon us, and of the many books, programmes and articles currently published about the event, one of the most novel and fasincating is Brian Cathcart's history The News from Waterloo. This tells not the story of the battle but of the race to report the news in Britain, and in doing so it tells us a lot about the transmission and understanding of news in the past, and the world of news we enjoy today.

The 11:00 am 'Waterloo' edition of The Times, 22 June 1815.

The battle itself took place on Sunday 18 June 1815, ending somewhere between 9 and 10 that evening. The British public, however, did not start to receive certain news of the outcome of the battle (nor indeed confirmation that any such battle had taken place) until the very end of Wednesday 21 June, with the London newspapers reporting the story from the morning of the 22nd.

The reasons for this delay were several, and in describing them Cathcart gives an excellent and accessible account of how newspapers operated in the early nineteenth century. To begin with, there were no journalists at Waterloo. Newspapers in Britain at that time did not have journalists as we would understand them; there were parliamentary reporters (a recent innovation after government had finally conceded to the reporting of its affairs), there was an editor who would write the editorial, and there was much gathering of content from other sources, such as official sources - foreign news was generally channeled through the Post Office, as a means of exercising governmental control over reporting such dangerous information.

Government exercised control over newspapers through law (particularly libel laws) and through taxation, which had the effect of narrowing down the number of people who might read a newspaper because of the cost, and hopefully keeping the news out of the hands of the masses. This only worked so far, because newspapers were nevertheless distributed widely, borrowed, made available in reading rooms, inns and coffee houses, and read aloud in groups. But the high cost meant a restricted buying public, and together with the mechanical limitations of newspaper production of the time kept down the number of copies published - The Times sold around 7,000 copies a day in 1815.

News travelled slowly, though it was speeding up. The mechanical or optical telegraph, which worked by replaying signals from high vantage points, meant that messages could travel quickly over long distances, and it awakened in people a sense of news being able to be communicated to them far more quickly. However, the telegraph was expensive to maintain and it didn't work in the dark. Extraordinarily such problems led to the British closing down their telegraph operation shortly before Waterloo, so the only way to get the news to the British public was by road and water.

Cathcart's book entertainingly describes how news false and true made its way to London from Waterloo, causing much confusion among a public desperate to know if Napoleon had been defeated, as accounts of the battles that took place the day before Waterloo were muddled up with the battle on the 28th, communicated by private individuals who brought over scraps of information on what they thought had happened.  (See his blog post for the British Newspaper Archive for a summary of these unofficial reports.) The official dispatch, which Wellington completed writing around noon on June 23, was mysteriously delayed while its bearer, Major Henry Percy, was travelling through the Netherlands. It then got held up crossing the Channel when the wind dropped, so that Percy ended up having to get into a rowing boat, before completing his journey by post-chaise. Finally the official dispatch was delivered in London around 11:15 pm on Wednesday 21 June, not a moment too soon for the newspapers laboriously to remake some type and to publish an account for the morning editions.

The Morning Post, 22 June 1815, via British Newspaper Archive (note that it is the second edition)

There were an estimated 56 newspapers published in London at this time, from dailies to weeklies. The leading titles were The Times, The Courier, The Morning Post and The Morning Chronicle. This was a time before there were press directories with lists of all newspaper titles published, but in the British Library collection we have just under 300 British newspaper titles from 1815, with some 40 of them published in London. So it is not every newspaper that was published. Cathcart has done a remarkable job piecing together the complex narrative of what was published when over 18-22 June 1815, noting where a newspaper issued more than one edition with more war information, but bemoaning the fact (on his website) that "Superb though it is, the British Library collection is nothing like complete for 1815." Well, there's a reason for that.

In 1815 there was no national newspaper collection. The Stamp Office took in a copy of every newspaper published (part of the taxation regime designed to keep the newspapers in line), retaining these for a period of two years before disposing of them. It was only in 1823 that copies published in London started to be transferred to the British Museum, with regional newspapers following after 1832, and not until 1869 were newspaper deposited directly with the Museum.

So for newspapers in 1815 we are dependent on private collections acquired subsequently, and inevitably there are gaps in the surviving record. Moreover, the British Museum and then the British Library have always collected just one edition of a newspaper per day, for practical reasons of space. We do not have, and cannot have, everything. Different editions of an historical newspaper on a single day are therefore quite a rarity (indeed most titles in 1815 only produced a single edition), existing usually on the few occasions where the same title was acquired from different collectors.

From page 3 of The Times, 22 June 1815, via The Times Digital Archive, summarising information on Waterloo learned from the official dispatch.

Fortunately 22 June 1815 is one date when there are some different timed editions available. The early edition of The Times for that day had the above notice, noting that the official dispatch had been received and summarising its contents. It is this version of the newspaper that can be found online via the Times Digital Archive (subscription access only, freely available in British Library reading rooms). The copy in the British Library is of the second edition, issued at 11:00 am that day. For this the second page of the 4-page newspaper had been entirely remade to accommodate the Duke of Wellington's complete dispatch. The full two pages are illustrated at the top of this post; the start of dispatch on page 2 is below, alongside the earlier page 2 from the version on the Times Digital Archive:

From page 2 of the The Times, 22 June 1815, early morning edition on left (via Times Digital Archive), 11:00 am edition on the right (from British Library collection), with the official dispatch from Waterloo reproduced on the right-hand column.

The dispatch had first been published in The London Gazette, which was a government publication issuing official information, and which is still in operation today (as The Gazette). The Waterloo 'extraordinary' edition of The London Gazette is freely available online, and this is the front page:

 

The London Gazette, 22 June 1815, via www.thegazette.co.uk. Wellington's official dispatch did not reveal the information that the battle had been won until halfway down the second column of the second page.

Once The London Gazette had been published, the other London newspapers plundered the official text for their own editions, and then gradually the information spread over the nation as mail coaches carried the news to every corner over the next few days (Edinburgh, for example, received the information on Saturday 24 June).

Today we may marvel at a time when the news of a major battle took three days to get from Waterloo to London, with part of the journey undertaken by rowing boat. We live in a world of constantly breaking news, where tweets or other electronic alerts informs us of news happening even before it is news (if we define news as something which has been composed after a period of time with an understanding of the context of the story, and with checks made to verify it). News has become instantaneous. Moreover news is cheap, for the most part free (in the UK) from governmental interference, and created by legions of journalists.

Yet in some ways the news archive we are creating for 2015 will be as problematic for future historians as 1815 is for us today. We are not keeping every edition of every newspaper published on any one day. More than that the news has now spread over so many different media and platforms that it lies beyond anyone's ability to capture it all. Still more problematically, we are failing to capture the experience of news today. Increasingly we are finding our news online, but web archives can only operate as snapshots, capturing how a web pages looked at a particular point in time.

Most of the websites that we archive are crawled just once a year, but for news websites we archive these on a daily or weekly basis. Yet not only will stories fall between the cracks (i.e. they may disappear from a site between one archive capture and the next), but the experience of the flow of news is lost. There is nothing in web archiving - as yet - that can capture the experience of seeing news being reported as it happens, as we experience through ever-changing Twitter feeds or through the increasingly-popular live blogs on news websites (and the British Library does not currently archive social media, except on a very selective basis). News is increasingly tailored to our individual interests - we may each of us see a different news. News is now an endless succession of ever-changing editions; but as archivists we still capture it as a single instance, as though it were still a thing on paper, to be published just once a day.

The endless flow of news - the live #Waterloo200 Twitter feed at 18:36, 18 June 2015

In 1815 we see the news almost overwhelming the mechanisms that were put in place to communicate it. The need to know outstripped the means to satisfy it. That led to new technologies. In 1814 The Times had introduced a steam-driven press, which would transform the rate at which newspapers could be printed. The arrival of the railways greatly spread how newspapers could be distributed, and the electric telegraph (the first working system of which was demonstrated in 1816) collapsed the distances between places worldwide. The invention of steam ships put an end to becalmed sailing ships holding up the news from overseas.

In 2015 we again see the overwhelming nature of the news. There is so much news available that services like Facebook must now filter it for us, telling us what they think we need to know. We cannot capture everything, yet we must strive always to capture something, and trust in the ingenuity of historians such as Brian Cathcart to fill in the gaps in the archive as they find it. History is not made by the evidence; it is a product of the reasoned imagination.

Where to find British newspapers from 1815:

• British Library - most surviving British newspapers for 1815 are held by the British Library and can be accessed by anyone with a Reader's pass at either of our sites (St Pancras, London and Boston Spa, Yorkshire)
• British Newspaper Archive - the subscription website based on digitised newspapers from the British Library's collection has 48 titles for 1815, four of them London titles (Morning Chronicle, Morning Post, The Examiner, Cobbett's Weekly Political Register)
• The Gazette - the full run of the London Gazette from 1665 (when it was the Oxford Gazette) to the present day can be found for free on its site
• Guardian and Observer Digital Archive - subscription site  - only The Observer was published in 1815
• Newspaperarchive.com - American subscription site with some British titles covering the 1810s
• Times Digital Archive - subscription site for The Times, from 1785 to 2009

The UK General Election of 2015 was decided by television. Despite the ardent advocacy of some newspapers, and for all the claims being made about it being a social media election, television dominated perceptions, debates and the presentation of policies. A Panelbase survey of the UK audience said that 62% found TV coverage had been the most influential in informing them about the general election and the policies of the political parties, far more than newspapers at 25%, websites at 17% (mostly the BBC news website), radio at 14%, speaking to family and friends at 14%, and only 11% social media (primarily Facebook). 38% of the audience said they were influenced by the broadcast debates, 23% by TV news coverage and 10% by party political broadcasts.

James Graham’s The Vote, broadcast on More4 on election night 7 May 2015, with Judi Dench, Catherine Tate, Timothy West and Mark Gatiss

It is important therefore that to have an archive of what was broadcast on television over the general election period. The British Library's Broadcast News service usually takes in around 30 hours of TV news and 18 hours of radio news each day, from 22 channels. We expanded this significantly to capture every debate, party political broadcast, manifesto launch, campaign event, press conference, interview, leader profile and documentary that we could, plus the full election night broadcasts of each of the main broadcasters (including those from BBC Scotland, BBC Northern Ireland, BBC Wales and STV), as well as coverage given to the election from CNN, France 24, Al Jazeera English and RT (Russia Today). We also recorded the relevant TV dramas (Coalition, The Vote) and comedies (Ballot Monkeys, Newzoids, Have I Got News for You etc).

From RT's general election night coverage

Overall, between 26 March (the date of the first of the TV debates) and 8 May 2015, we recorded 1,775 television and radio news programmes. Not all touched on the election, but most did, and it makes for compelling evidence for how much energy and calculation went into using television as the forum for a national debate.

All of these recordings are available via the British Library's Broadcast News service, accessible at our St Pancras (London) and Boston Spa (Yorkshire) sites. We're also making available here a spreadsheet listing every programme we recorded between 26 March and 8 May. They are listed by date, medium, channel, type of programme, title, description and duration, and the data can be sorted by anyone interested to undertake some preliminary analysis or simply to see in one list which party political broadcasts were recorded.

Download Recordings 2015_general election

The programmes are also listed on a new Special Collections page on the Broadcast News site, with links to all the main recordings. Please note that these general election recordings do not as yet appear on the British Library's main Explore catalogue (but will do eventually).

We would be interested to hear from any researchers using this archive. Do get in touch via [email protected].